Silent Hearts
by peppermints smile
Summary: In the end, it's almost a relief when it happens.


It isn't anyone's business but her own.

Still, Tess wonders if she should've told him, after. And if so, how?

She's a smart woman - a woman who isn't afraid of pleasure and knows how to safely enjoy the things that she wants. Kids are certainly not anywhere on her long-term plans; to bring something so innocent and pure into her fucked-up hellhole of a life would almost be cruel. Still, by the end of the third week of the third month, with her third missed period in a row, her racing heart wasn't just from fear.

There was hope there, too. A tiny flicker of a flame, the kind of foolish hope that children have when they're told fairy tales, when they're still young enough, innocent enough to believe them. And then beyond that, when they're old enough to know, yet still cling to the might-have-beens that fill their heads with wonder and joy.

 _Pregnant._

Shit.

Kids don't belong in this world, in her world, and even if they did, she's not too sure Joel would be the one she'd pick to have them with. He's too jaded - too busy fighting his own fucked-up demons, as they all were. Except, here it is. The truth of it, the foolish hope. And then, moments later, the cold, harsh clarity of reality. She knows she can't tell him. A younger Tess perhaps would have gone down that bitter road, would have barged into his apartment and demand that they decide, right there and then, what the outcome would be. But the older Tess, the inured and weary Tess, knows better.

People don't change.

So, in the end, it's almost a relief when it happens.

Even the pain of it, the cramps and the aftermath. She's still early enough that it's easier to think of it this way. She takes some of the least-expired painkillers from their last pickup from Bill and shuts herself away in her apartment for a few days, drifting in and out of fitful sleep, but what's done is done. It's for the best. It's for the best. _It's for the best._

* * *

Later, much later, she's stitching Joel up after a particularly nasty argument with one of their shadier clients. It's dark in his apartment - it's always dark in there, but she brightens the kerosene lamp as best she can. He's quiet tonight; subdued, probably, from blood loss. She always wonders how he can take so much pain. Not just the physical, but the weight of the burdens he carries.

Then his head turns and she swears he can see her, can see right through her.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

She feels a chill run down her spine and she knows that there's no use pretending she doesn't understand his question. Absentmindedly, her hands spread out slightly on his skin. He feels warm to the touch, and she wishes she could tell if his heart, too, is racing. Slowly, she looks down, licks her dry lips, and tries to form an answer.

"Didn't want you to know."

Joel clenches his jaw, the corded tendons of his neck flexing. "Can... I at least know what happened?" His voice scrapes raw, like brittle nails on jagged concrete, full of restrained emotion.

"I'm not pregnant anymore, Joel." She feels older than her thirty-four years, suddenly. "Not really much else to say than that."

He leans back against the couch, his eyes fixated on nothing. Tess wonders if he still sees the world in flames in their moments like this. At length, he shifts again.

"I'm sorry."

She blinks. "For what?"

"I dunno, just…"

"Joel - "

"For everything, I guess." He turns his gaze back to her face, watching her mouth, listening, waiting for a reply.

Tess doesn't know how to respond to that. Instead, she wets one of the pads of gauze from their stash and begins to clean some dried blood on his skin, a bit more gently. If it hurts, he doesn't react.

After a few minutes' silence, she sighs. "Look, if I didn't want to be here, I wouldn't be."

"I know that." The corner of his mouth twitches, so quick and hidden beneath his peppered scruff that she thinks she could have imagined it. "Whatever... happened, Tessa, 'm sorry you, uh - y'had to be alone."

"Would you have come?"

The question comes out more bluntly than she intends, and she can see that it startles him. She thinks then, that perhaps she doesn't want to know, really. Both of them find comfort in their little self-deceptions; that the warmth and the affection constantly manifesting itself between them simply does not exist. She wonders if these things are nothing more than slow suicide - a penance for the unnamed sins she hears hidden in his voice.

When he speaks, his answer surprises her.

"Yeah." He is calm, but firm. "Yeah… I woulda come."

It's only later, when she's lying next to his rumbling frame, her breasts pale in the cool night air, that she realizes it's the closest thing to 'I love you' he's ever said.


End file.
